After about a year of living where I live, I’m ready to enter the killzone again. A pure white space, with nothing on the walls. The kind of space I need to be to play a first person shooter. No distractions – the walls in the game could be white too, for all I care. Every little hand crafted texture and high-poly object: just more shit to shoot.

Up in that space, I have a little tiny Emerson television. It’s got a solid black frame, kind of oblong shaped. No smooth curves – made in Tokyo, but probably not designed by any of the other big companies at the time like Sanyo. It works. A little cantankerous piece of plastic and ribbon and glass that the remote for long ago ended up in some landfill.

I am not surprised that it isn’t that much of a distraction to constantly have the words “CH 02” burned above whatever I need to see. If I squint real hard I can read little JRPG text boxes past it. I was going to introduce the game with a line about how I’ve “never been a fetish object” person, but all objects are fetish objects.

My TV is covered in the dust and fingerprints of every stranger who’s walked by it in the thrift store I bought it from. Some of the buttons have been handled so much you can tell the finish is completely rubbed off of them. Unless I’m cleaning it, I never touch the LCD TV I have all of my other consoles plugged into.

Really – all of our collectibles are little fetish objects. Plastic or metal pieces meant to be moved around and handled. Maybe it’s a “human being” thing to just love touching stuff. A direct line between “kids who pick up sticks in the woods” and “people who go into the military to shoot a gun.”

That’s sort of the ultimate fetish object, the distillation of my Emerson TV or turning the dial on an old touch-telephone. A firearm. A gun. Pull the trigger, get a reaction. Pull the slide back, turn the safety off. Drop a magazine. Push your ammo into one, cramped hands and all.

“FIRST PERSON SHOOTERS” weren’t originally about fetish objects. All of the guns in DOOM only perform that essential behavior necessary to turning the hordes of hell into pools of unhallowed meat and blood. They don’t reload. There is a single outlier: the Shotgun.

There’s a vivid memory of it I can picture in my head: maybe anyone who has played a videogame can. Maybe the most devout of the “guns are disgusting murder weapons” crowd can see and hear that sound in their brain from the days they played DOOM as a kid. I know I can. I have fired real shotguns, maybe looking to see what gets closest to that sound and feeling.

It really is true: videogames are selling our kids guns. Videogames might even be selling people the idea that guns are fun fetish objects, just like film and television before it and youtube after. Don’t believe me? There are a dozen channels out there right now dedicated just to reloading animations.

BLACK was made by Criterion Games. No relation. They’re still around today, working on spinoffs and revivals and DLC for other games.

I remember BLACK. I remember it being sort of the first game of its kind. Black wasn’t a First Person Shooter. It was a First, Person Shooter. Buried in the king of jingoistic “i’m just doing the right thing” plot of CIA intrigue and foreign terror-ists was a game that put the guns front and center. There are monsters in this game: the only conversation they want to have is one about violence.

Everyone in Bl- BLACK as the box renders it, is trying to kill you. They run out of cover or dart behind it, dirt covered hands heavy on the trigger finger. Spray them with ammunition and watch them take the fall like trained hollywood stuntmen.

The satisfying thing isn’t the killing. There’s no blood to be found anywhere in this game, and for good reason. Blood doesn’t make Time Crisis fun, so it doesn’t have it either. We don’t need to see the blood, there’s enough of it in our lives to leave us fucking soaked inside and out. I can get blood whenever I fucking want. I can choose cartoon candy blood, black and white blood, those huge gobs of the sticky wet stuff in a slasher movie. Let me choose to have blood on my own time.

closer to how anyone actually played this game

BLACK is about the fetish of firing a gun. All of the guns in BLACK are unique kinds of loud. An UZI might Rat-a-tat-tat to life with the tap of the shoulder trigger. A small flash lights up the corner of the screen, bodies go flying. Sometimes you trigger the ragdoll physics and shoot someone so hard they do a flip over the boxes they were standing in front of. Every once in awhile, a shotgun shell to the stomach makes someone double over and just fall there. It’s sick, it’s nasty. There’s no blood, I’d let a seven year old play it.

BLACK also knows the capital G game player in us knows we don’t really care about the difference between gun types. We don’t need to indulge in that deep of a fetish, there’s no comparison between handgun types. All of the most famous guns are there: AK47, MAC-10 We know what it’s supposed to do: I’ve seen Miami Vice. No one will ever really comment on all of the guns, except for to tell me how cool they fucking are.

All of the guns here are types of keys, too. Like giving an upgrade out, a Shotgun can knock down doors. A pistol is good for headshots. Machine guns are your bread and butter: this is a game entirely without iron sights. The badguys all shoot you exactly once so you know where they are and then miss afterwards. Run forward, hold down the trigger and hope for the best.

All of that is the videogame shit. A few hundred words so you know we’re talking about game where you should be shooting every second of every level. Buried in there is the stench of Jingoism: a game about The Right Type of Man making the Tough Decisions.

What’s on the surface is a pure advertisement for gun porn. Don’t you like how this feels? Look at how many types there are: “Machine Gun” doesn’t mean anything when there’s a new type to fondle every level. Come on kid, pull the trigger. AK-47’s and M4’s and all the popular stuff you see on TV.

Time Crisis is a game about pointing an orange piece of plastic at a TV screen. Sometimes, I mean rarely in my life there’s the really GOOD cabinets that have the plastic guns with the working slide. BLACK takes all of that and puts it in the TV. This wanted to be as close as anyone had gotten to the big bombastic hollywood guns.

Most levels, you can’t even really see what you’re shooting at. The reticle turns red for a moment – everything I need to go from Passive to I Want To Fucking Kill.

For a brief moment it’s possible to get lost in the absolute fantasy. To believe, for a split second that it takes anything more to pull the trigger. A vicious isolating type of fantasy. Maybe the other people really are nothing but targets. Maybe it really was easy to shoot that kid. Build into the fantasy code of firearms is a type of solipsism that doesn’t exist in real life.

It can take stepping on a range for more than a single day. It can take buying a firearm and learning to understand it. These are ultimately objects – dressed down from the fiction of games like BLACK. Really, it’s the most insidious type of gun porn. Completely detached from firing a gun, but choosing the sound and motions like it’s the real deal.

What fantasy are gun companies selling us? How do they benefit from even a videogame released a full decade ago now? When we see the image of cops shooting fucking kids or whatever set of paramilitary ghouls was last overseas gunning down civilians, that’s the painting they want to make us think of.

It all sounds nice when you dress it up like BLACK does. Feel the weight of the pistol in your hand. The muzzle flash. The lingering scent of gunpowder. Finger on the trigger leaves a spray of pock-marked holes in the side of something between modern architecture and an ancient ruin.

BLACK was a game inspired by a drunken weekend in Las Vegas. Inspired by a tourist trip to the southwestern gun store where some office-workers and weekend shooters probably got to fire all the big guns they’ve been drooling over since boomer parents took them to see Terminator 2 in middle school. The best kind of American propaganda is usually the subconscious time.

a history nobody even saw!

Roll through that anonymous place news channels call “The Middle East” or Russia or North Korea. This particular war is all about Chechnya, but never as a means to comment on the human rights abuses there. We all need to recognize that a terrorist can be anyone with a gun in a ski mask – one day maybe even you or me. Pull the trigger, and remember it every time someone else does it on TV.

In light of Chechnya’s real world politics, it’s darkly funny that BLACK spends so much time painting a picture of the country as so violently opposed to the US hegemony when all of the real world human rights violations they take part in are right out of the historical version of the US playbook. We’ve got enough wars we can dress up or dress them down as much as we like.

With the fantasy of firearms comes the fantasy of the Operator. These aren’t your dad’s war heroes – these guys are Masculine and in this videogame all played by Actors so you know the story is Grounded. No one fell for the aura of psuedo legitimacy the game went for, but maybe it’s a little funnier if we take it all at face value.

BLACK is a fantasy about disposable firearms around every corner and how much fun they would be to shoot. BLACK is a fantasy about anonymous terrorists around every corner and how much fun they would be to shoot. Never mind the things these countries do to deserve it: until the day we can be the Good Guys again we can play the moral high ground by taking part in a war that only kills the truly justified.

Kill streak. Tactical Nuke. MAC-10. AK47. I Use Guns All The Time.

BLACK is loud and in your face, and grabbing you by the head and saying “WHAT POINT IS A GUN WITHOUT SOMETHING TO SHOOT.” Criterion accomplished what they set out to do. An ugly loud game that could only come from a weekend in Las Vegas.

“Pro-Gun” Propaganda always manifests as a dangerous fantasy, because there’s very little fun about being shot at but a lot that’s fun about firing through a magazine on a Saturday afternoon into a paper target a few meters down wind. Videogames aren’t broadly closer to reality now, but BLACK is an example of how fucking far it can go in the other direction.

You’ll be so far away from all of the shooting you won’t even need to see blood.

you can see our other articles about firearms HERE and HERE. you can follow us on TWITTER @DEEPHELLDOTCOM and you can give us money at PATREON.